Morning Edition

First Disney/Pixar. Now this? Who is this man and what did he do to Steve Jobs?

It’s not that I don’t like Mondays. It’s the stuff that happens on Mondays that gives me pause. Well, before the day’s events overtake you, please consider the following aggregation of tech news.

APPLEBERRY? Speculation surfaced over the weekend that Research In Motion and Apple Computer might join forces and create a super-duper wireless device that marries the iPod and the Blackberry.

In an article in the Globe and Mail, analyst Peter Misek, a Canaccord Capital Inc. researcher who last year correctly predicted a RIM/IBM collaboration,says Intel executives are encouraging the BlackBerry maker to get in bed with its iPod counterparts.

Furthering that unfortunate metaphor, former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee expressed some concern about the personalities involved:

I want to see the two CEOs of RIM and [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs working together. The thought of this menage a trois is absolutely hilarious.

Agreed. When it comes to competition, my money says Jobs would be much more interested in the iBury.

RAMPAGING SWEDES: The Swedish government is investigating a group of hackers after the country’s primary Web site went down over the weekend.

The Swedish authorities believe the attack is linked to the shutting down of a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing site.

Indeed, a few hundred people gathered in Stockholm Saturday to protest the closure of Pirate Bay, a file-sharing site that shouldn’t be surprised it got busted with a name like that.

According to a Reuters story on the matter, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet quoted a group called World Wide Hackers as saying they had arranged an attack on the government’s Web site.

YOUTUBE FIRES BACK: In a response to Yahoo launching a viral video site recently, YouTube has launched a redesigned site that will allow users to create their own “channels” on the popular video sharing site.

Reuters

The new, new YouTube

Stay tuned, har har.

LIBERAL WHIPLASH: Former Clinton Administration press secretary Mike McCurry has taken a boatload of trouble since he started lobbying on behalf of big telecom firms in the ongoing Net Neutrality fight on Capitol Hill. (The telcos want the right to charge people extra for prioritized delivery of Net content.)

Well, McCurry lashed back in a recent LA Times article, saying that net neutrality is really a political battle between leftist and centrist ideologies. He went on to say that supporting a tiered Internet was a classic centrist position straight out of the Clinton White House.

… This is an anti-corporatist jihad, is it? Is that why we are aligned with Microsoft, Google, and eBay? And when did the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America join the “left?” What a pathetic attempt to marginalize those of us working for net neutrality.

McCurry … continues to claim that he’s fighting for the Clinton-era status quo. But that is what we demand, and what a growing bipartisan army of allies in Congress are working toward. We want the Clinton-era rules. Not McCurry. He and his allies are working to gut those regulations to allow the telcos to run roughshod over a free internet.